x, 321 pages : 25 cm

As Nathan Huggins once stated, altering American history to account fully for the nation's black voices would change the tone and meaning - the frame and the substance - of the entire story. Rather than a sort of Pilgrim's Progress tale of bold ascent and triumph, American history with the black parts told in full would be transmuted into an existential tragedy, closer, Huggins said, to Sartre's No Exit than to the vision of life in Bunyan. The relation between memory and history has received increasing attention both from historians and from literary critics. In this volume, a group of leading scholars has come together to examine the role of historical consciousness and imagination in African-American culture. The result is a complex picture of the dynamic ways in which African-American historical identity constantly invents and transmits itself in literature, art, oral documents, and performances

Each of the scholars represented has chosen a different "site of memory"--A variety of historical and geographical points, and from different ideological, theoretical, and artistic perspectives. Yet the book is unified by a common concern with the construction of an emerging African-American cultural memory

Includes bibliographical references and index

The Black writer's use of memory / Melvin Dixon -- The politics of fiction, anthropology, and the folk : Zora Neale Hurston / Hazel Carby -- W.E.B. Du Bois and the struggle for American historical memory / David W. Blight -- African-American commemorative : celebrations in the nineteenth century / Geneviève Fabre -- National identity and ethnic diversity : "of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown and Ellis Island" : or, ethnic literature and some redefinitions of America / Werner Sollors -- International beacons of African-American memory : Alexandre Dumas père, Henry O. Tanner, and Josephine Baker as examples of recognition / Michel Fabre -- On the wrong side of the fence : racial segregation in American cemeteries / Angelika Krüger-Kahloula -- What one cannot remember mistakenly / Karen Fields -- History-telling and time : an example from Kentucky / Alessandro Portelli -- Memory and mass culture / Susan Willis -- Performing the memory of difference in Afro-Caribbean dance : Katherine Dunham's choreography, 1938-87 / VéVé Clark -- "With a whip in his hand" : rape, memory, and African-American women / Catherine Clinton -- Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose : history and the disruptive power of memory / Andrée-Anne Kekeh -- Art history and Black memory : toward a "blues aesthetic" / Richard J. Powell -- On Burke and the vernacular : Ralph Ellison's boomerang of history / Robert G. O'Meally -- The journals of Charlotte L. Forten-Grimké : Les Lieux de Mémoire in African-American women's autobiography / Nellie Y. McKay -- Washington Park / Robert Stepto -- Between memory and history : Les Lieux de Mémoire / Pierre Nora

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